Holyrood Palace and Rain!

We had been forewarned that that it was going to be very wet and indeed it was (not just in Scotland but everywhere). The hotel was hosting the Team GB swimmers who were getting in some final practice at the Royal Commonwealth Pool in Edinburgh (not in the hotel, though it had a reasonable-sized pool which Vanessa used twice during the stay). The Team GB’s visit made for some extra bustle and excitement, including the presence of various security personnel and ‘greeters’ at the hotel entrance.  Richard said he had to explain to the 'greeters', several times, that he was not an Olympic Swimmer! (Ha! Ha!).
We went to Holyrood Palace in the morning and enjoyed both the Palace (particularly the rooms occupied by Mary, Queen of Scots) and the Queen’s Gallery which was showing ‘Treasures from the Queen’s Palaces’ as part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations. We all had favourite pieces, but paintings by Rembrandt (Agatha Bas) and Van Dyck (Thomas Killigrew and ?William, Lord Crofts) were popular with all.

After lunch in the café there we took a taxi – to avoid the torrential rain – to the National Gallery of Scotland where we went to the exhibition, Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910. We had mixed views on this but Vanessa loved the Scandinavian pictures, particularly Lake Kei by Akseli Gallen-Kallela which she had seen previously in a London exhibition. Keith and Wendy stayed on to see more of the permanent collection, and Richard and Vanessa went to John Lewis to buy Vanessa a camera to replace the one which went missing during the move back to Winfrith, and has never surfaced. They then went to Gladstone’s Land in the Royal Mile (NTS) to see what life would have been like living in 17th Century Edinburgh when this area was the heart of the city, and, afterwards, to St Giles Cathedral to admire the Victorian stained glass windows. In the evening we ate in the restaurant in the hotel, to avoid getting soaked again!